Most modern automobiles are equipped by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with infotainment units that can present media including visual media. The units can present audio received over the Internet by way of an audio application running at the unit, for instance, and present video received from a digital video disc (DVD), for instance. While many units can also present visual media such as navigation and weather information received from a remote source, presenting video received from a remote source remains a challenge.
Other display devices or components, such as televisions and computer monitors, can receive video data by way of a high-throughput, or high-transfer-rate interface such as a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) or Video Graphics Array (VGA) port. (HDMI is a registered trademark of HDMI Licensing, LLC, of Sunnyvale, Calif.) Digital media routers have been developed for plugging into these high-transfer-rate ports for providing video data to the display device.
Most host devices, such as legacy automobiles already on the road, do not have these high-transfer-rate interfaces. Increasingly, modern vehicles have a peripheral port, such as a universal-serial-bus (USB) port, or a wireless receiver for use in transferring only receiving relatively low-transfer-rate data from a mobile user device such as a smart phone.
Transferring video data efficiently and effectively by way of a lower-transfer-rate connection, such as USB remains a challenge. Streaming video data conventionally requires high data rates. While HDMI data rates can exceed 10 Gbps, USB data rates do not typically exceed about 4 Gbps.
Barriers to transferring video data efficiently and effectively from a remote source to a local device for display also include limitations at the local device, such as limitations of legacy software and/or hardware at the local device. Often, the mobile user devices do not have a video card and/or the vehicles do not have graphics-processing hardware. And, for example, USB video class (UVC) is not supported by either commercial Android® devices or prevailing infotainment systems. (ANDROID is a registered trademark of Google, Inc., of Mountain View, Calif.)
Another barrier to transferring video data from a remote source to a local display is a high cost of hardware and software required to time-synchronize transmissions between devices to avoid read-write conflict.